QFD Analysis: From Customer Needs to Design SpecsAbstract: New product development (NPD), invention, innovation—call it what you will, but all refer to basically the same discovery-analysis-creation process. Not that many in the product design biz could describe it fully; many work on an intuitive level. One of the primary, formalized methods to help in this process is quality function deployment (QFD), which got a bad name in the 1990s. “It was multi-failure. A lot of practitioners thought it was just chart drawing and changing voices of customers to specifications. It wasn’t,” says Jim Finn, QFD unit business manager for International TechneGroup Inc. (ITI; www.QFDcapture.com; Milford, OH). Add to this, says Larry Keeley, president of the design firm Doblin Inc. (www.doblin.com; Chicago IL), that many of the formalized NPD methodologies, like QFD, “reveal a certain kind of command-and-control bias.” He thinks that bias is part of the reason why U.S. automotive companies seem to be struggling “to get powerfully relevant products and services,” and suggests these tools “are specifically about making sure we focus on the things that matter for manufacturing. They do nothing to help us think through little curiosities, like the customer and what he or she might want.”But since the ‘90s, QFD seems to have “evolved to its most appropriate applications,” comments Bob Hayes, vice president of product development for New Product Innovations, Inc. (NPI; www.npi.com; Powell, OH). In fact, QFD has changed. “Enough consultants [are] pushing the idea that you’re trying to make better engineering decisions,” says Finn. Another change is in the QFD methodology and its associated software.